


Like Crocuses in the Snow

by Lauralot



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst and Tragedy, Blood, False Memories, Gen, HYDRA Trash Party, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Memory Alteration, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Horror, Self-Hatred
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-29
Updated: 2014-08-29
Packaged: 2018-02-15 07:56:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2221416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lauralot/pseuds/Lauralot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is impossible, without corroborative evidence, to distinguish a true memory from a false one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like Crocuses in the Snow

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [this prompt](http://hydratrashmeme.dreamwidth.org/587.html?thread=360011#cmt360011) on the HYDRA Trash Meme: _Post-TWS, Bucky is back with Steve and struggling to remember everything erased by HYDRA, but is troubled by disconcerting flashbacks and nightmares. When his therapists dig even deeper into his repressed memories, they uncover brutal sexual abuse at the hands of HYDRA--basically Bucky was made to perform every awful HYDRA party trick imaginable, and is understandably traumatised by the resurfacing memories._
> 
> _Steve, enraged and perhaps even looking for the beat-you-half-to-death kind of revenge, tracks down Rumlow, the highest-ranking surviving member of HYDRA within S.H.I.E.L.D., and confronts him about raping Bucky. Except Rumlow has no idea what Steve is talking about, because Bucky's memories aren't real but were induced by his overeager therapists._
> 
> _I just want to see Steve explaining to Rumlow in every horrible detail what he thinks Rumlow did to Bucky (the more graphic, the better!), and Rumlow being all_ Christ, Rogers, that's some really fucked-up shit.
> 
> As a warning: This fic is not tagged with rape/non-con because there is no actual rape within the story. However, Bucky believes that he did experience rape, and his false memories of rape are detailed throughout, so proceed at your own discretion.

He remembers only the sensation of pain, not the catalyst.

The pain comes in his dreams, white hot flashes searing through the vast, empty expanse that serves as his mind. He feels his body forced down into the dirt more than he recalls it, cheekbone abrading against the ground. There are shards of something, glass or shrapnel, embedded into his skin, and the friction brushes some away and drives the rest in deeper. 

His body is burning, the fire blistering all the way down to his blood. The blood is flowing freely, but it’s a secondary misery, like the tremors that follow a wipe or the tightness of his skin when water is withheld. Something is shoving, forcing its way inside his body, and the stretch, the tear, the _scraping_ , is more than even the Soldier’s training can withstand. He is shaking, nearly convulsing. Low, pained whimpers trickle from his throat like the rivulets of blood from his scratched face, threatening to flood and form howls. 

A hand at his mouth, a hiss in his ear. “Shut up.” He can’t see the face, but the voice, the callused fingers digging into his flesh, are those of his commander. “It’s gonna hurt more if you move, keep your mouth shut.” 

The Soldier bites his tongue until the taste of salty copper saturates his mouth. He is so, so still, but there is blood leaking from everywhere and something else dripping out of his eyes, and despite the voice at his ear whispering that he is being helped, that it’s almost over, his vision is blanking from the pain and the Soldier believes he is broken beyond repair. 

*

There are tears on his lashes when he wakes. 

Bucky hadn’t understood crying when he was the Soldier. He had considered it a malfunction, akin to oil leaking from machinery. Steve told him that it was natural, human. Steve told him that _he_ was human. Bucky believes Steve because Steve understands his body—understands Bucky Barnes—better than he can. 

He lives with Steve now that SHIELD has cleared him. They say he is tame; he can be trusted not to kill everyone or return to HYDRA, even if he is not constantly supervised. Bucky thinks he believes them. The doctors also understand him better than he can understand himself. 

The tears are wiped away by the time he walks into the kitchen but they must somehow still show on his face, because Steve asks, “Another nightmare?” 

“Another memory.” The distinction matters to the doctors. They say the dreams and flashbacks are his body’s way of returning what was lost, and he must come to terms with the memories in order to heal. All Bucky knows is that he will be sleeping or thinking of nothing in particular, and images will unearth like flowers reaching up from under the snow. He thinks he saw flowers in the winter in Russia. Crocuses, they were called. But the more he remembers the less he sees purple petals emerging from ice. He thinks of fingers, bluish and frozen solid. Of carcasses. Carcasses in the snow seem more fitting: everything he remembers is either death or suffering. 

Steve’s hand squeezes onto Bucky’s shoulder as he sits and Bucky leans into the touch. His body has been tense since he woke, tense for as far back as he can remember, but some of the stress eases now. Steve doesn’t ask about the memory. He never does. Steve leaves it to the doctors and trusts Bucky to open up on his own terms. “It’ll be all right, Bucky,” he says, voice as steady an anchor as his hand. “You’re doing so well, you know that? You’ll be all right.” 

“I know.” He knows because Steve has never lied to him, no matter how far from “all right” Bucky feels. 

“Oatmeal?” Steve asks, his hand sliding away, and Bucky nods. 

He has to go back to the doctors today. They will want to know about the new memory, will make him walk through it again and again until they are satisfied that his mind’s latest offering is thoroughly dealt with. His stomach clenches and Bucky has to force himself to eat from the bowl Steve places before him. He doesn’t want to go, doesn’t want to remember any more of the hurt, but the doctors know better. They understand how to fix him and they always tell him how well he’s done when he remembers, how proud they are of his progress. They trusted him enough to release him from SHIELD’s hospital. He has to learn to trust them to repair his mind. 

Steve would say the same, Bucky is sure, so he doesn’t bother to speak.

* 

His doctors use a trick called hypnosis. 

When they introduced the idea, they said it was like sleeping. Having spent almost a century unconscious, it seemed an easy enough state to return to until they’d explained that hypnosis was induced through relaxation. Bucky’s first memory is standing at a zip line, waiting for a train. He wasn’t relaxed then. He hasn’t relaxed in seventy years. 

He would have said no—it was wrong to waste everyone’s time in a fruitless endeavor—were it not for Steve. Steve never left his side in those days and he served as a prosthetic memory when the doctors needed answers about Bucky’s medical history. “You’ve done it before, Buck,” he’d said. “I mean, not in therapy. There was a fair when we were kids. They got you to act like a dog.” 

Bucky hadn’t ask how that constituted an altered state. He simply agreed, because Steve had said it was possible. 

He is under now, lying back in a chair. The first time, it had taken him so long to sit down. _This chair,_ they’d promised, _will never, ever hurt._ It isn’t a lie, because he only ever feels the pain of the memories once he is fully awake again. In the chair he is watching from a distance, with the separation of the Soldier but with an understanding of the emotions the Soldier could never identify. The feelings he never bothered to process because weapons should not feel. He is in the chair, a doctor’s hand on his own, but he is also in the dirt again, pinned down. 

“Tell me everything you can remember,” the doctor says. 

“Someone…I think the commander, knocked me down,” Bucky recounts. He tries to draw to mind every detail. He tries to be good. “There was noise around us—combat? I don’t know. I was hurt all over, I remember blood. It felt like—like something was tearing me open. And his hand was on my mouth and he told me to shut up.” 

“You’re doing so well,” the doctor soothes, hand stroking his own. “What else do you remember?” 

The answer is nothing, but that can’t be the right answer. It’s barely a memory and Bucky struggles to unearth the rest. “I—I don’t know.” 

“Can you remember how you felt? You were frightened, weren’t you?” 

“I was hurt.” 

“You must have been frightened.” 

“Yes,” he says, because fear often accompanies pain and because he can remember the fear now. The doctors understand his reactions better than he does and sometimes it takes their prompts to recall things correctly. He searches for more of the memory and he thinks he can remember a ghost of sensation beneath the pain, a tug on the leather of his vest. “I—”

“Yes?” 

“I think he pulled on my clothes.” Bucky can’t think of why he would or what connection that would have to the pain. “I’m not sure—”

“Trust yourself, Bucky,” the doctor says. Somewhere in the distance, he hears another doctor scribbling down notes. “He pulled on your clothes. Did he tug on your pants?” 

“Yes.” He remembers feeling that; he can practically see it. 

“Did he pull them down off your hips?” 

“Yes.” 

“Okay, you’re on the ground. Your pants are tugged down,” the doctor recounts, and Bucky visualizes it as she speaks. “He’s reaching out to touch you. Where is he touching you?” 

“His hand is on my mouth.” 

“And his other hand?” 

Bucky’s first thought is his abdomen, the source of that searing, tearing pain, but he can’t remember the touch there. And there had to be a purpose to removing his clothing. “I think my leg?” 

“Was his own clothing on?” 

“I don’t know.” 

“Did he remove his pants?” 

“I don’t know.” His eyes shut tighter, left fist clenching as he struggles to recall. He remembers blood on his face, pain, the scraping of his left arm against the rough surface of the ground. There has to be more. “There was—I heard metal.” 

“Like a zipper?” 

“Yes.” 

“He opened his zipper?” 

“I—yes.” 

“Okay.” The doctor’s voice is very soft. “Okay. It’s all right, you’re safe. I know this is hard, but you’re safe here, remember? We’re here to help you through anything. Now, he held you down and he opened his zipper. Did he touch you?” 

The hand at his mouth, fingers digging in, the rough whisper: _Shut up._ “Yes.” 

“Did he touch you sexually? Penetrate you with his fingers or penis?” 

“N—” But he can’t say for sure. That pain within, that awful burning stretch, like sandpaper to his insides. And his pants were tugged down and why else would his pants be tugged down? And _it’s gonna hurt more if you move_ and hurt tearing through him and— “Yes.” 

“He penetrated you?” 

“Yes,” Bucky mutters and he can _remember_ and the doctors are gentle, telling them they know how hard it is to remember but that they will help, saying how proud they are that he trusted them to tell them, and it hurts so _much_ , hurts outside of the memory, but he must be feeling wrong because they promised this chair would never hurt.

*

Cut the right tendon, and the entire body will collapse. He learned that as the Solider. 

As Bucky Barnes, he learns that traumatic memories work much the same way. 

It only takes one memory—a rape in the dirt—for others to come spilling out like ichor from a wound. He wakes in the mornings, eyes stinging, tongue thick with the ghost of bitterness and salt, and he remembers. He remembers hands fisting into his hair, forcing his head down, feels the burn in his scalp. He remembers breath hot on his throat, murmured threats or mockeries of affection. _Your body doesn’t belong to you,_ he remembers, a lesson they’d enforced since 1945. 

And he’d known that. Weapons have no say in how they are used. It was just that he hadn’t remembered _how_ he was used, not before now. He doesn’t want to remember, no matter how much they say it will help. 

Some nights he doesn’t sleep, as though that will safeguard against his own mind. He is sick of memories, sick _with_ them: a dull ache smolders in the pit of his stomach and nothing settles the nausea and tremors. But the less he sleeps, the more his mind wanders, and the more darkness bubbles up to the forefront of his thoughts. 

He was more—less—than just their weapon. He was their toy, their party game, passed around from handler to agent like a dog-eared book, spine broken and pages stained with sin and refuse. _Moan like a whore,_ someone had ordered, but he wasn’t even that. He was a warm receptacle for their release, an automaton that didn’t need to be wound up to play. 

It was bad enough to be the Soldier. The Soldier at least, Bucky could understand. There was purpose to their manipulations, gains to be made with each life he took. However calculating and cold the means and the ends were, there was _purpose._

His newly remembered secondary function: there was no purpose to that. No gain beyond amusement and orgasm, no logical yet evil end game that made the set-up understandable if no less terrible. A reason wouldn’t make the memories any better, but it surely couldn’t make them worse. 

He is sick all the time and the knowledge—the shame—is ever-present, burning so hot in his skin that he ought to fall to ashes. He can’t bear to see his own body, to remember what was done with it. Bucky doesn’t see his reflection now when he looks into mirrors: he sees hands in his hair and his mouth reddened, swollen, and abused. He wants to cut at his hair and flesh until he no longer resembles HYDRA’s plaything, but the more he thinks of that he remembers there were agents who incorporated his blood and rapid healing into their games. 

Steve is worried. Bucky can see it in his face, his eyes, hear it in his words when Steve thinks Bucky cannot hear him on the phone. He wants to tell him—talking is supposed to make it better and he doesn’t want Steve to worry—but how can he say it? How can he look Steve in the eye again if Steve knows what he’s been reduced to? 

Then one day, he is in the kitchen, taking dishes from the washer and placing them in the cabinetry, when his mind is back in the memory chair, and he freezes as if restrained. _Open your mouth_ , he remembers, the words they would say as they slid in the bit, but in this new vision it isn’t a bit that they force past his lips. 

The plate shatters on the floor. His feet are bare and now they are bleeding. 

Steve rushes in, a hand on Bucky’s shoulder, asking soft, concerned questions that Bucky doesn’t hear as he bolts from the touch, letting slip a scream he doesn’t even think to contain. 

For a moment, Steve only stares. His eyes are so worried and so open and Bucky collapses under their scrutiny, slumping onto the floor. The glass in his feet scrapes at the tile like the shards in his face from the memory that opened the floodgates. 

Steve joins him, close but not touching, and asks the questions Bucky knows he’s been holding in ever since they reunited after the helicarriers. He doesn’t want to speak but the words are spilling out like vomit. The rape in the dirt. Being bent over the counter in the Secretary’s kitchen, right before he was sent after Steve and Romanoff. Waking from the cryo-tank, incoherent with cold, and being warmed by the bodies of HYDRA technicians. Every awful secret is pouring from him and Bucky can’t bring himself to raise his eyes. 

There is a long moment of quiet and Steve reaches out, rests a hand gingerly on Bucky’s arm. He can’t flinch away from the touch, frozen, waiting to be told how soiled and damaged and worthless he is. But Steve pulls him close, his hold both tight and gentle. 

When Bucky dares to raise his head, he recognizes the look in Steve’s eyes. It is not, he thinks, directed at him, but it still makes Bucky cold because it’s a look so unlike Steve. 

It’s a look of murder.

*

_At least I’m not dead._

Insofar as mottos go, it’s a hell of a lot less profound than “order only comes from pain.” But waking up to find HYDRA in shambles and his own body burnt to a crisp—though not so much that he couldn’t feel every staple of the skin grafts—overwhelmed any structure Rumlow might have found in the agony. “At least I’m not dead” was the best he could manage, and it had taken months for that mantra to develop; death had seemed much less tedious than lying stuck in a hospital bed, waiting for a court summons. 

It wasn’t until the mousy little lawyer assigned to Rumlow’s defense managed to swing a dismissal of charges on a technicality that the thought of living became anything more than a burden, and “at least I’m not dead” seemed like an opportunity. 

Sometimes it’s a comfort, when he thinks of Rollins and the rest of the strike team crushed or burned to death in the Triskelion. Sometimes, when he wakes in the night because the scar tissue on his body feels so tight it might split, when there are bills to pay and no one’s willing to hire the HYDRA agent whose face and crimes were trending online, it’s a slap in the face. It’s his only constant now. _At least I’m not dead._

It’s not quite the thought that crosses his mind when he opens the door of his apartment only to be thrown back inside by a very pissed off super soldier. Instead, Rumlow thinks _Oh fuck, I’m not dead_ quickly followed by _I’m about to be._

Plaster cracks behind him when he hits the wall and there goes his security deposit, but he just has time to register that nothing’s broken before a hand clenches around his throat. “Rogers.” He manages to speak, to smirk. “I was wondering if you’d ever visit.” 

That the man’s fist doesn’t break Rumlow’s jaw—that it doesn’t split his head in half—means Rogers must be holding back, but that isn’t a comfort. Rumlow’s vision goes white, legs threatening to buckle, and what’s meant as a derisive laugh comes out as blood splattering onto the carpet. 

“You sick _bastard_ ,” Rogers growls, and Rumlow must be some kind of stupid because he can’t help the bloodied grin that graces his bruised face. 

“Gotta say, I expected you sooner.” The words are a little slurred— _Damn,_ Rogers has a hell of a right hook—but his tone is causal, steady. Like he didn’t lie awake in the hospital waiting to be put down like a dog, didn’t check over his shoulder for weeks upon release. “What, were you busy house-breaking your new pet—”

His cheekbone snaps under Rogers’s fist, and Rumlow isn’t sure if he cries out or not because the pain renders him momentarily deaf. He is shoved back into the broken wall, the captain’s arm digging into his throat, and his hearing returns just in time for him to catch the snarl of “Don’t you _dare_ speak about him.” 

Laughter is the worst response Rumlow could go with, really, and not just because it sends pain lancing through his face. But fuck it, he’s either going to be killed or crippled by this idealistic idiot and he might as well let Rogers know exactly what he thinks of his outdated moralistic grandstanding in the process. Rogers isn’t the only stubborn asshole here. 

“Oh, is that a sore subject?” he rasps, managing to take in just enough air to speak. “You really oughta thank us for babysitting, big guy, it’s not like you ever bothered to look for hi—”

His oxygen intake is fully cut off and Rumlow’s seeing stars. Appropriate. He’s knocked to the floor and when his vision clears, Rogers is looming over him, fuming, shoulders heaving and face flushed and obnoxiously, typically perfect even in his outrage. “I knew you were scum. I didn’t think you were _evil_.” 

“Multitasking. It’s one of my skills.” 

“How could you?” Rogers demands, and if not for the wave of throbbing in his face, Rumlow might laugh again. “It wasn’t enough for you to take his mind and his will? Big, tough HYDRA agent has to rape someone helpless to get off?” 

A pause. 

“Rogers, what are you talking about?”

Whatever answer Rogers wanted to hear, it wasn’t that one. 

Rumlow’s seen the guy fight before. It’s not clean and pretty like in the old USO movies Rumlow had idolized when he was young and even stupider. He knows Rogers can be brutal and lethal but he still isn’t expecting the boot that connects to his sternum, winding him and likely cracking ribs. There’s no time to catch his breath; Rogers hauls him up by the collar with a fire in his eyes Rumlow’s never seen, not even during the fight in the elevator. 

“Don’t play dumb.” 

Rumlow might say he hardly has to play it, but for once in his life he shuts up, mind racing as it tries to process anything past _Oh Christ that hurts_. Rogers is accusing him of—did he just say _rape_? 

“How _could_ you?” Rogers doesn’t wait for an answer this time. He doesn’t look like he wants one. He looks absolutely _wrecked_ and if Rumlow’s body weren’t so focused on the pain aching and sparking through his nerves, he’d probably be pissing himself. There’s no time to speak, to even think of what to say, before a hail of blows is raining down on him. 

It’s a damn shame they couldn’t have brought Rogers to their side, because he creates the kind of pain HYDRA could only dream of. The strikes are too fast for Rumlow’s body to numb itself to them, each a unique flare of agony that sends him reeling, but Rogers somehow manages to keep him upright even though both of the man’s fists are flying. He’s fast, almost too fast for Rumlow’s eyes to track, but the _coup de grâce_ is an honest-to-God headbutt to the face, like an angry bull, and Rumlow sees that just fine. 

He’s on the floor again. His nose is broken, blood gushing, and there are other injuries that can wait to be tallied until he can breathe again. _Fuck, I’m not dead._

“There was a time I trusted you with my life,” Rogers spits. “There’s a special place in hell for your kind of evil, you rapist pig.” 

Getting angry is not in the best interests of his continued survival, but it’s not like it’s voluntary. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” 

“Oh no.” His voice is deathly quiet. “You don’t get to play innocent. You’ve never denied the blood on your hands, but this is too much for you to own and still sleep at night, you coward?” 

Rumlow stares, eyes black and swelling. “What kind of man do you think I am, Rogers?” What, because he’d chosen the side that actually had a chance of giving order to humanity instead of joining hands and _hoping_ for a better world, that means he’d be willing to rape? He knows Rogers has a black and white view of morality. It isn’t until now that he realizes just how warped that view must be. 

“I know what kind of a man you are.” The conviction and anger are almost palpable in Rogers’s glare, so vivid and sure Rumlow would almost believe himself guilty if that weren’t _insane_. “You’re the man who held my best friend down in the same chair where you burned his memories out of his mind and took him against his will. Who made him look you in the eyes when you forced yourself down his throat. Who passed him around your new recruits like a damn _training exercise_. You watched him cry when Pierce shoved him over a desk and you _laughed_ and joined in. You made him beg for it, you took him in the showers—you didn’t even let him off the battlefield before you raped him. You’re a monster. You’re not even _human._ ” 

No one lasts in HYDRA without a strong constitution. Rumlow still feels nauseated. “Christ, Rogers, that’s some really fucked up shit.” 

“You think this is funny?” 

“I think you’re delusional. You think—you honestly think—I knew you were a bad judge of character. I didn’t think you were _that_ bad.” Rogers thinks he raped the asset? The idea’s deplorable enough, but the _asset_? Who would ever get near the asset long enough to try it? No one liked spending time around him—his very existence was an uncomfortable reminder of the questions no agents wanted to ask themselves about the justifiability of the actions HYDRA took. “You think I would—who the hell told you that?” 

“ _Bucky_.” The name sounds like an open wound. 

And here Rumlow had imagined some HYDRA mole pulled from the wreckage of SHIELD, dropping his name along with the most twisted crimes imaginable in the hopes of amnesty. He’s never known the asset to intentionally lie. Then again, he’s never known the asset while the asset plays human. “If he really believes that, then the wipes did a lot more damage than we ever realized.” 

The hand is back at his collar. It’s starting to get old. “Are you calling my friend a liar?” 

“I’m calling him _sick_. When did he tell you that?” _Took him in the showers_? Yeah, Rumlow had rinsed the asset off following thaws and missions, but where would he get the idea of rape? A nightmare? A misunderstanding of terminology—did the asset even understand what sex was? Or—no way was SHIELD letting the asset interact with Rogers without heavy duty deprogramming. “Tell me you don’t have shrinks trying to dig up his old memories.” 

The look on Rogers’s face says everything he needs to know. Wonderful. “What’s your point?” 

“Anyone who was conscious and sober for any part of the eighties knows recovered memories are a load of bull.” Unbelievable. If he’s going to have the shit kicked out of him by a super soldier, it ought to be for something he actually did, or barring that, something _plausible_. And to pour salt in the wound, there’s no chance of disproving it: the way the asset heals, there wouldn’t be physical evidence even if anything had happened. “It’s just daydreams and little pieces of memories and a whole lot of crap.” 

For the first time there’s something to Rogers’s stare beyond fury, try though he seems to be doing to bury it. “You think his doctors made it up? Convenient.” 

“I think I’ve sat through my fair share of SHIELD psych evals, and those shrinks couldn’t find their asses with both hands and a GPS.” With a surge of daring and idiocy, Rumlow bats Rogers’s hand away and manages to sit up without yelping from the pain. He tries to sound self-assured. He has to, to make it out of this alive. “He’s got, what, the cognitive functioning of a little kid?” Even with the healing factor, that many electrical shocks had to do major damage over the years. “Kids will tell you the sky’s purple if you ask the right way. They tape his sessions? I guarantee any question they had about rape suggested the answer.” 

Rogers has softened in spite of himself. It’s not trust; any camaraderie that may have existed between them is long gone. It’s _hope_ : Rogers must desperately want his friend’s delusions to be just that, must want to wish away the hurt he believes the asset experienced. “If you’re trying to weasel your way out of—”

“I’m not a rapist. I’m a lot of things, I’m not _that_. Who wants to fuck a robot anyway?” Sure, the asset’s beautiful. So is an Uzi. No one fucks an Uzi. 

“Don’t call him—”

Rumlow has a thing about being impatient toward people who beat him senseless. “A robot? Right, that’s the worst possible thing I could do. Except, you know, let a bunch of hacks trick him into thinking he’s been raped. Way to go, big guy, you’re officially a worse caretaker than I could ever be—”

Okay, so that was just asking to be punched again. And he’d expected as much. Didn’t make it hurt any less. 

There’s a soft voice from the doorway. “Don’t.” 

Rumlow raises his head. His eyes are almost swollen shut now, but he can still make out the asset.

“Bucky,” Rogers breathes, and Rumlow hadn’t known his voice could sound so gentle. “Bucky, what are you doing here?”

The asset is trembling. He used to shake badly after the wipes, to the point of needing help up from the chair, and this is even worse. Rumlow would question how he’s standing upright, except he’s seen the asset take bullet wounds without flinching.

“Followed you,” he says, head still down, and Rumlow’s never seen him look so small. “I—It’s not worth it. I don’t want you to go to prison. Not—not for _him._ ”

The asset raises his head then, with all the slow, shivering trepidation of a child who knows he’ll regret looking at the monster movie on TV but who can’t help himself. He doesn’t look at Rogers. His eyes meet Rumlow’s, and the look in them is more of a shock than even Rogers’s blows managed to be.

The asset’s eyes are full of fear and pain and _hatred._ Rumlow’s seen the asset electrocuted, beaten, and shot, but he’s never seen that look before. Hell, once the asset was nearly disemboweled in a grenade blast and Rumlow had to force him down, digging the shrapnel out of his gut by hand and praying the healing factor would kick in, and even then he’d looked better off than this. There’s a flicker of something dangerously close to pity and Rumlow smashes it down.

Rogers doesn’t punch him this time. His fist slams into the wall, sending a new wave of cracks through the plaster. “Yeah,” he says, voice still soft. “Okay. It’s all right, Bucky. Let’s get you home.”

When Rogers reaches the doorway, he raises a hand to touch the asset’s shoulder and the asset flinches away, and isn’t that a pretty little picture.

“If you’re lying,” Rogers says, looking back over his shoulder, “you’ll wish I had killed you.”

Rumlow finds it in himself to smirk. “It’s kind of funny. You wanted to save him, and you’re the one who fucked him over.”

Rogers doesn’t have a retort and that almost makes the whole encounter worth it.

**Author's Note:**

> Rumlow's mention of the 1980s and recovered memories is in reference to the [Satanic ritual abuse scandal](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_ritual_abuse) that occurred in the United States in the 80s and 90s. Many adults undergoing now-discredited therapies to recover repressed memories claimed to have been abused in Satanic cults as children, inciting a moral panic.
> 
> The story summary is a paraphrased quote from the American Psychological Association's official [Investigation of Memories of Child Abuse.](http://www.skepdic.com/repress.html)


End file.
